Input on a PC Build for Video Editing

[Harm Millaard]

Sareesh,

No, it was not a typo. With the limited SATA ports available and the number of disks and the backup to the USB3 drive, I think a raid0 for media and projects is acceptable. It would not be my first choice, but then I use a dedicated raid controller and can circumvent the limited ports and still have lots of redundancy, but that does not apply to Vincent.

Raid10 is a costly array, because it requires 4 disks at least, and there are only 4 SATA 3G ports on the Intel controller, so the DVD/BR has to use the last SATA 6G port, it only delivers the same performance as a 2 disk raid0 array and only gives you the storage capacity of a two disk raid0, despite the cost. So IMO it is too costly on this kind of system to use raid10.

[Vincent Anthony]

Thanks again folks, especially Harm! That clears things up nicely. I was pretty confused by reading all around the web it seems. Will stick with the normal drives for now and upgrade to SSD's once they get less expensive.

I see in the benchmark tests that many people are using SSD's for their OS, but not so much for the working discs at this point: Benchmark Results

Going to see if I can fire this monster up this evening after I straighten out the wiring.

[Trevor Dennis]

Vincent, it would be interesting if you were to run the PPBM5 test and let us know when the results are up. Unless the PPBM6 test is running now, but I'd guess that is going to need time to build up a useful number of results.

[Vincent Anthony]

Absolutely Dennis, will do that as soon as I have her up and running. Still haven't gotten to finishing the wiring today...

[Vincent Anthony]

She is up and running, wired as neatly as possible, and ready to update the bios (currently running 2104 x64) and install the OS.

But before I do, I have come up with a few more questions...

At idle with the bios monitor up, this intel core i7 3820 processor is ranging at temps between 37 and 39 degrees. I looked up the thermal specs on intel's site, but all I see are max temps based on wattage. Ambient temp at my home is around 25 C and the motherboard temp is at 34 C. Does this seem normal or did I mess up installation of the CPU cooler?

Second question - on the ASUS P9X79 Pro MB, should the TPU and EPU switches be enabled? I am not planning to manually overclock, because that's over my head at this point and I just want the machine to be stable.

Thanks folks!

[Harm Millaard]

The ambient temperature is pretty high. If it were say 20 degrees, CPU temp as indicated by the mobo would be at least 5 degrees lower.Your reported temps for CPU and motherboard are somewhat high at stock speed, but that may be caused by several factors:

1. Sub-optimal cooling paste or ill applied cooling paste. Not thin or even enough. And keep in mind the cooling paste has to settle, which can take hours, or even days, depending on the paste.
2. Insufficient air flow in the case.
3.The CPU cooler is not attached correctly. Beware you do not over-tighten the screws. Fasten them as you would a tire to a car, one side slightly attached, then the opposite side, then the next corner, then the opposite corner and then in the same sequence tighten them all a bit more, but please do not exert too much power.
4. The default VCore voltage is too high (a typical Asus idiosyncrasy). Unlikely at stock speed.

In my case I have an i7-3930K running at 4.7 GHz. With an ambient temperature of 18° C it runs idle around 24° C, but then I reduced the VCORE voltage from the standard 1.40V that is default with this CPU multiplier of 46 and a BCLK of 102.3 to 1.32V

In your case I would have expected a slightly lower temp of the CPU at stock speed, even with an ambient temperature of 25° C of somewhere around 31° C, but it is definitely not a major worry. It is well within the range Intel specifies.

The thing to keep in mind is that ambient temperature has a huge impact on components temps and a 5° C higher ambient temp may easily lead to 7- 8° C higher component temperatures.

[Trevor Dennis]

That is a suprisingly low temperature for the CPU Harm, but you are the expert in these things. My CPU is running 10°C above ambient with the Intel water cooler system. Same CPU, but a milder OC. It is damn hot here at the moment though.

What sort of situation is your system box positioned in? I have to admit mine in less than ideal tucked away in the footwell under my desk, so probably not getting the coolest air in the room. Most of my drives are in the tower as well, whereas I'm guessing your big raid arrays are in an external enclosure.

Vincent, are you running MSI Afterburner to control GPU fan speed? My box sounds like a train when booting up until MSI ab kicks in and slows the fans down. I use those fans as feedback on how hard the system is working.

[Harm Millaard]

Trevor,

I have everything in one big box. 2 SSD's, 2 BR burners, 1 multicard reader and 25 HDD's, 15 of which in hot swappable bays and room for 6 more HDD's and 2 SDD's.

Here are some pictures of the build: Final Results

It is on casters tucked away under my desk, so to access it I just roll the case out from under the desk and have easy access. The space between the top of the case and the underside of my desk is limited to around 2 cm, but that is enough for the two exhaust fans on the top of the case.

Another thing is that all my fans always run at full speed, with the exception of the video card. The video card, a GTX 680 is overclocked to 1145 MHz GPU and 1177 MHz memory and runs idle at around 33° C with a 35% fan speed and under stress testing (GPU load around 98%) below 56° C with a fan speed of 50%, giving a memory bandwidth of 201.9 GB/s.

[Vincent Anthony]

Trevor, I too have all 5 drives in my fractal define XL case, but haven't yet noticed much noise from the card. When it boots up the card is designed to run the fans in reverse for 30 seconds to remove dust and then spin them in the opposite direction for cooling. That may be what you're hearing.

This is the first PC in a full tower that I've ever built, and I have to say I am in love with the engineering behind the fractal case. It is really quiet.

Now that I have installed all the ASUS software, the software monitor has my CPU temp at 25 C with a motherboard temp of 34 C. Either things settled in or the software monitor reads cooler than the bios monitor.

Harm, I will not mess with the voltage settings for now, but may try the automatic Turbo overclocking feature later on. You went over my head in your prior message where you spoke of a CPU multiplier of 46 and a BCLK of 102.3 to 1.32V....I'll stay away from that for the moment.

I thank you all again for the help, and after following all the instructions in my MB manual I see that this isn't too bad at all to get going. One strange error I encountered was that windows 7 only recognized 28 out of 32GB of RAM initially. However, after getting windows up to date the full 32GB was available. I did not suspect a memory error because the BIOS recognized it all properly from the beginning.

I have never seen such high windows experience index numbers. 7.7 for the CPU, 7.9 for everything else, and a terrible 5.9 for the primary hard disk. This makes me want to swap out the OS drive for an SSD, which I guess I'll do as soon as I see a price break on a nice 512GB model that brings it down into the $250 range.

Great photos of your monster Harm, I am currently going through some of your windows setup notes.

After that I am off to set up RAID0 on the intel and marvell ports, and then learn how to optimize adobe CS6 for this new setup. If all that goes as smoothly as the everything has gone so far, I will be very happy.

[Harm Millaard]

Vincent,

This is only for people interested in overclocking their system, but what it basically comes down to it that all PC's use a BCLK, base clock of 100 MHz frequency.

If you increase the BCLK, like I did to 102.3, then everything on that PC runs not in multiples of 100 MHz, but in multiples of 102.3 MHz

The CPU ratio means the multiplier the cores are using for their clock speed settings. In my case I use a multiplier of 46, so instead of the standard multiplier of 32 for the i7-3930K (100 MHz base clock times 32 as the standard ratio, giving a stock speed of 3.2 GHz) I have it overclocked to 46 x 102.3 = 4.7 GHz.

This may sound complex and I think you are best off with getting your system up and running first, before you get into overclocking and modifying voltages, etc.but I gave this explanation to give you some background, that hopefully will not go over your head.

[Vincent Anthony]

That makes perfect sense, thank you Harm. I did engage the auto tune function to see what it would do and I think it overclocked the machine to around 4.8 GHz. The temperature went up a few degrees immediately. I disengaged it, because as you said - I will get things running first and then learn more. Overall, the build experience has been a lot of fun. Never have I had my hands on such beautiful PC equipment. It is a whole different level than the HP consumer machine I am currently using. I would actually love to build another, just for the fun of it! Too bad my budget doesn't allow that.

[Vincent Anthony]

Last question...for this month.

I successfully setup RAID on both the Marvell (64KB Stripe) and Intel drives (128KB Stripe). I read the IRST user guide (nothing about formatting) and searched around the web to see about how the new drive arrays should be formatted. The MB manual walks you through how to create the RAID0 drives, but leaves off there.

From reading around the web it seems that the answer is to format both as simple volumes. Is that info correct?

[Harm Millaard]

Correct, but I suggest you format all raid arrays as GPT volumes, instead of MBR. It allows access to volumes larger than 2 TB and it uses a file table both at the beginning and the end of a volume, giving better responsiveness and more safety.

Also see Adobe Community: How to access more than 2 TB of disk space?

[Vincent Anthony]

Thanks once again Harm. For some reason, a discussion that goes through the whole RAID0 array creation procedure as it applies to this particular application was not easy to find anywhere on the web.

Each drive is 1 TB, so I am under the 2TB limit for both arrays.

I installed the disk unlocker software from Asus because I thought I might need it to access the 2 external 3TB USB 3.0 drives. However, I haven't plugged those in yet! Will take a look at that post in the Adobe forums before I do.

[Vincent Anthony]

I lied about the prior one being my last question for the month, sorry.

The Intel RAID drives formatted nicely.

Marvell drives are unhappy and having various different errors.

Error 1 - Slow format - failed and then drive was not recognized for a moment.
Error 2 - Quick format completed in under a minute and the drive was accessible - but I figured that couldn't be proper or reliable, so I attempted another slow format.
Error 3 - Slow format hung up and would not cancel, so I attempted a restart and the restart hung up. Ctr-Alt-Del technique got me a solid restart after that.
Error 4 - Started a slow format again, it hit 4% and then quit. The RAID0 disk now appears as 1862.7 GB RAW in the disk manager as a healthy primary partition. The Marvell event messages stated: disk 1 is plugged out, then virtual disk 0 is offline, followed by Physical disk 1 is plugged in. Very Strange.

I created the array using Ctrl-M, so now I will try to delete it and re-create it using the software interface in windows - then try a format again. Did searches on the web, and again couldn't find a definitive answer. Marvell driver is latest from the ASUS site. Maybe the drives were just in a bad mood.

Error 5 - Initialized the Marvell drive a s MBR instead of GPT and it took a quick format less than a minute to complete once again. The drive passed a health check and seems operational. Attempted a long format after the health test, and the long format failed again with a microsoft error message that said "unable to format" At this point the RAID0 drive disappeared from the drive list in My Computer.

....and now the only one of the 2 drives used in the marvell setup is being recognized, the other has disappeared from the list in the Marvell Utility as well as in the disk manager. The BIOS shows the drive, however.

After more troubleshooting, including plugging the "bad" drive into another port (it was still not recognized), I suspect I may have a faulty Hard Disk. Does that sound right?